As her serial killer thriller is published, the debut novelist describes how her writing got darker... and funnier... as she grieved her father’s devastating illness
I remember when I was six years old, sitting on the floor at infant school, listening to the teacher tell us the most brilliant story. Full of intriguing plot twists, it was fast paced, exciting … and then the bell rang. ‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I need to know how the story ends.’ The teacher smiled and suggested I write my own ending. So, I did. And that’s when I realised how much I loved writing because unlike other subjects we studied at school, there were no right or wrong answers when writing a story. The next day I was so excited to show the teacher what I’d written but never found the courage to pull the pages from my bag. What if she read my words to the class? What if they laughed? I decided I should probably focus on the other subjects at school – the ones with right and wrong answers, and by the time I was studying law at university, even I had forgotten the part of me that liked to write stories.
I worked in commercial litigation for a while until an autoimmune condition took away some of my sight and ironically made me see life more clearly. Law is a great career, but it wasn’t the right career for me, so I left my job and joined a temp agency. Flitting between office work and hospital appointments, I was able to focus on my health and slowly my vision started to improve. I got married, had four children and one evening found myself telling them a bedtime story. They demanded new stories every night and I was happy to oblige, spending a few minutes each day thinking up plots and adventures. One day, I started writing ideas down – my written words adopting a much darker tone than the stories I shared every evening. On the odd occasion all four children were distracted by CBeebies at the same time, I started to write a thriller. I kept it secret because I felt embarrassed and ashamed. With a million more important things to do with my snippets of spare time, how horribly self-indulgent of me to try to write a novel.
In-between work and parenting, I eventually typed up all my scribbled notes – it took years, but I had written a book! So excited, I sent out the first draft to literary agents and when it had been rejected by them all, I started writing another. Years later, that was finished too and again, I sent out the first draft which again, was universally rejected. So, I focussed on my idea for the next book – a serial killer who sees her victims as ghosts before they die, and that’s when my dad w
